Enzo

In 2025, when the film, Enzo, was released, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine was still in progress before being overshadowed in the media by fresh American and Israeli military attacks in Iran. The film distinguishes the respective attitudes of two Ukrainian construction workers in the E.U. state of France regarding whether to return to Ukraine to join the army. This contrast implies that patriotism, and, moreover, duty, is a weak force in human nature, even when a citizen’s country is in serious, existential trouble in being invaded by an empire-scale military aggressor.

In the film, the Ukrainians’ dilemma is overshadowed by the salient class distinction between Enzo’s upper middle-class family and a vocation of manual labor, including construction work. Enzo’s father, Paolo, may even take Enzo’s desire to continue as a construction-apprentice as a personal betrayal. Even though Enzo is only 16 years-old, he is able to “hit” back during a family dinner at home by characterizing his father’s academic profession as utterly fake (for what use is “book” knowledge?), especially relative to construction because, Enzo says, walls continue to stand even when the human beings who dwell within them have died. That Enzo’s own natural proclivity to draw would, as a profession, which Paulo is urging Enzo to adopt, be one of manual labor goes unsaid in the film. By implication nonetheless, the intricate use of fingers is of higher social class than the sore, blunt use of hands. To be sure, getting rich by selling art is heard of, whereas how many construction workers get rich by overlaying brick and mortar?

Enzo is, as a typical teenager, lost, and therefore needs time to find himself. His crush on Vlad, one of the Ukrainian construction workers, attests to the boy’s jejune state. Even his claim at the end of the film, on the phone to Vlad who has called in the midst of a battle in Ukraine, of having “fallen in love” with Vlad cannot be taken seriously. The film’s political and economic ethical elements are so salient that Enzo cannot be labeled as gay cinema.

Even though the ethic of socio-economic class is more salient than is the political leitmotif, the stark contrast in an early conversation between Miroslav and Vlad, the two Ukrainian guest-workers in the E.U., is riveting and thus worthy of notice and elaboration. Whereas Miroslav strongly feels a sense of duty to return to Ukraine to take up arms against the Russian invaders because “I might not have a country to come back to,” Vlad recognizes no such duty. Of course, the Ukrainian government is not going to forcibly grab Vlad and return him to his native country, and Vlad undoubtedly knows this, so his disavowal of a basic duty in citizenship can stand. Both men know that Miroslav’s intent to return to Ukraine is entirely voluntary, and it is precisely in this regard that duty can be understood as being a weak force in human nature. For all that deontologically-oriented ethicists make a big deal out of duty per se (e.g., Kant), the force, like gravity, is actually weak. The fullness of emotion that people in the rapture of fulfilling a duty belies the fact that duty must be willed, and slavish attachment to momentary pleasure is actually a stronger force as an instinctual urge.

So it is interesting, as well as perplexing, that both of the Ukrainians tell their construction boss that they would be returning to Ukraine (implication: to fight) in two weeks without anything in the screenplay as to how or why Vlad changed his mind. The oversight, or leap, can be construed as an understatement concerning how much mental effort is involved in a change of will. It is not as if Vlad suddenly grew an internal sense of duty. Presumably Miroslav had said something that convinced Vlad to return to fight. It is precisely because duty is so voluntary, unless mandated by a government at gun-point or threat of imprisonment, that Miroslav’s rationale is so crucial to Miroslav’s change of heart—or is the rationale more practical in appealing to Vlad’s self-interest? In not furnishing an answer, the film falls short in terms of political theory, whereas the socio-economic ethical tension is more fully depicted and resolved as Enzo capitulates to his parents’ world after having tried to commit suicide at the construction site, for going to New York to learn English can be construed as being on track to eventually joining his parents’ echelon vocationally, even as an international artist whose art sales could benefit from connections made in New York. Such a world is miles way from that of a construction worker. 

In contrast, Vlad being scared to death by bombs exploding nearby in Ukraine—how he got to that point—is unexplained and thus unaccounted for. Next to such fear, and even the anticipation of such fear, the emotive sense of duty is weak. Even in Hobbes’ Leviathan, the instinct for self-preservation can legitimately be acted upon even against a sovereign power. Whether a “right” or not, self-preservation is an inalienable feature of human nature even after an alleged social-contract by a group of people to give up power (even to interpret scripture!) to a sovereign power, whether a king or legislative assembly.  

Strange River

Not every film has an implicit Thoreau signature reflective of the nineteenth-century Romantic turn from the age of Reason. Not every film brings to mind the Romantic painter, Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851), whose painting of nature’s green growing over classic Roman pillars as if to say, nature has the last word. The European film, Strange River (2025), is such a film. The key to making these connections lies not in the film’s dialogue, but, rather, in Jaume Muxart’s consistent choice to direct the film by ending several scenes with elongated camera-shots of nature. This leitmotif has Thoreau’s Walden Pond written all over it and is an implicit critique of rationality and the related artificial societies that mankind has constructed at the expense of being natural.

The film centers on Didac, a sixteen year-old boy who, as a typical teenager, is engulfed in the growing pains of self-discovery. This takes place on a family biking and camping trip along the Danube river. The film opens while the parents and three boys are biking near the mouth of the river, and ends with the family angst gone where the river is much larger; life has been more fully experienced, with the parents having reunited from being emotionally fraught, and Didac having had a brief fling (not including gay sex) on a small boat overnight with another boy. Boys will be boys; nothing definite should be extrapolated. Early on, Lena, the mother, tells Didac, “This might be the last summer that the family is together.” Two arguments between the parents bear out the mother’s prognosis that the couple might get a divorce, and her sexual fling with a young man one night during the trip bears out her desire to wander.

Meanwhile, Didac is initially aggrieved that Gerard, a boy from school on whom Didac has a crush, has been ignoring him. Didac speaks with his father, Albert, on “the frustration of not being desired.” Albert urges his teenage son to share how he feels with Gerard. Both parents support Didac’s romantic interest in Gerard. “You guys kissed,” both parents separately remind their son with winks. For something much deeper than an infatuation, frustration is an understatement, so Didac’s crushes on boys are clearly not very serious, and he may eventually be sexually interested in women. Put somewhat bluntly, the importance of the role that water plays in how Muxart depicts nature in the film, especially with shots of Didac in particular swimming naked, brings to mind the problem in nature wherein heterosexual sexual intercourse is naturally well-lubricated (if not rushed) whereas anal penetration is not, but Didac’s instinctual urges for boys sexually are natural too. Also problematically, the two elongated camera close-ups of Didac’s butt while he is swimming on two occasions almost creep out the wide shots of a boy swimming naked, which prima facie can be construed as showing a human being fully in nature, and thus natural (whereas wearing gray suits in bland offices in artificial skyscrapers is not). If the film can be characterized as a love story, it is that of a family, rather than two boys, and, moreover, a love story with nature. To be sure, Didac takes after his mother in that both engage in “extracurricular” flings during the trip. In fact, Didac sees Lena kissing a younger man one night at a camp-grounds. “Don’t look at me that way,” Lena tells her eldest son the next day; she goes on to tell him that she had had a romantic night with a stranger on the same route twenty years before the present trip. That foray took place on a small boat and the young man disappeared, and Didac has the same experience with a boy on the current trip. With that boy, Alexander, disappearing in the morning before Didac wakes up, the film lapses in skipping ahead to Didac being with his family on a large boat without accounting for how the 16 year-old boy gets from the small boat anchored in the large river back to his parents. If Didac’s brief, free-spirit, foray with Alexander is supposed to feel magical, Alexander leaving Didac alone on the boat is too much reality. In fact, rather than viewing the film as falling within the “gay cinema” genre, if there is such a type (try “romance films,” as falling in love is falling in love), I contend that Muxart situates the film as a family dynamic couched within nature, in and as a part of nature. Rather than being apart from nature, and thus other animals, our species, homo sapiens, is in the animal kingdom, and this is evinced both sexually and in how we raise our offspring.

During the trip, while at an empty school that Albert attended as a boy, he gives his wife and three boys, who are less than attentive, a lecture on the building’s architecture. Albert claims that the rationalistic style is relaxing, but this is undercut as an argument ensues. Significantly, that scene ends with the camera staying on a tree whose fine branches and leaves are swaying in the wind. Nature is relaxing. In fact, Muxart has the 16-mm lens changed as the trip goes on because the river is larger as the family progresses on the route along the river, and shots of the water are salient in the film and to its very meaning. In fact, the film ends with a wide, sustained shot of the wide river, as if to say that nature has the last word as image. That the family, or at least Didac, swims nude can be taken as saying that his teenage growing pains are natural—that he is part of nature. When he is masturbating on the bank of the river after swimming nude alone, the greenery around him is as natural as his facial expressions, especially his eyes, as he is stroking his penis. As he approaches orgasm, a long camera shot of the river water sparkling in the sunlight with emotive instrumental music makes the connection with nature clear. What he is doing is entirely natural, and thus good. Even after Didac and his dad have a father-son talk on Didac having kissed a boy at school, a homosexual encounter that Didac initially denies as he tells his father, “You are too old to understand,” a long camera-shot of the river, which is wider than at the beginning of the film, ensues as if to say, nature has the last word; Didac should go on his natural instincts rather than try to rationalize or justify his attraction to other boys. My point is that Didac’s homosexual urges are not the point of the film; rather, such urges serve as props for Muxart’s leitmotif that we as a species are a part of nature, rather than cast apart, as Albert says in the film, “When no one lives in a building, it dies.” We may design and build buildings, but we are corporeal, organic beings and thus a part of nature.

We can move figuratively to a larger “camera shot” by changing our lens to the nineteenth century, when Romanticism evinced both by the painter Joseph Turner and the philosopher Henry David Thoreau eclipsed the Age of Reason. To be sure, it had been during the eighteenth century that the Earl of Shaftsbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith wrote on ethics by stressing the sentiment of disapprobation as being ethical judgment that some conduct has been unethical. There is no hint of Kant’s ethical categorical imperative wherein a logical contradiction in universalizing a maxim can be taken as evidence that the maxim is unethical. Instead, the viewer of the film is looking out on the river perhaps as Thoreau looked out on Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Even Aristotle looked to nature, and so too does Muxart in making Strange River; we just need to look at how several important scenes end. Just as Albert and Lena do not move forward with divorce, so too, the family does not divorce itself from nature. 

Downtown

Like the coronavirus in the early 2020s, HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s and for at least a decade after then paid little or no attention to national borders or even to nationalities. Even though coronavirus freely walked through the boundaries of our various group-identities with the implication being that they are actually artificial demarcated constructions, AIDS showed us that sub-societal cultural differences do exist. In fact, within a given sub-culture and thus group-identity, one set of values may be ethically and psychologically better than another set, so broad-strokes can be understood as over-simplifications. Even within the same group culture within a given society, drastic differences can exist to the extent that some people embrace and others reject cultural norms that are salient for the group. This is salient in the European film, Downtown (2026), which is about three gay men both when they are young adults in 1986 and old men in 2021. Even though the screenwriter and two producers emphasized in their respective remarks at a film festival in 2026 that that the filmmaking and the narrative of the film are both heavily Dutch, the lessons conveyed by the film transcend nationality and geography and thus betray the over-the-top states’ rights ideology in the E.U. that would claim that the E.U. state of the Netherlands is unique among the several states.

The film is saturated with death and yet the three men have survived. Lennart, immune-compromised from having had AIDS (not just HIV), refers to “Covid” as a “toy virus” relative to AIDS even though his father has died of “Covid” just two weeks before the dinner at Ronnie’s house in 2021. Lennart has paid a high price medically for having carelessly contracted AIDS in 1987 either from his own sexual forays or that of Bas, whom the film shows as living with Lennart for a time back then. In contrast, Ronnie, Lennart’s platonic friend from the mid-1980s on, is careful then and does not test positive for the virus in the film. Even though Lennart chastises Ronnie in 1987 for being too careful by “sitting on the sidelines” sexually and even for putting so much effort into helping men who are dying from the virus, it is Lennart rather than Ronnie who deserves the criticism, and not just sexually. The film demonstrates that gay men who are like Ronnie should confront gays who are like Lennart other on what boils down to fear and avoidance of emotional intimacy and the role of sex in distancing people where it counts. In fact, the difference between the characters of those two men renders efforts to generalize the gay “community” with a single stroke, as the Roman Catholic Church has done, as highly inaccurate and unhelpful, for the Lennarts should be “fair game” for ethical and even psychological critique while the Ronnies should be lauded.

Throughout his adult life, Lennart is uncomfortable with emotional intimacy being expressed physically, so he is drawn, at least as a young adult, to impersonal sex with guys whose names he does not even know, or care to know. This discomfort is dramatized in the early scene in which Ronnie tries repeatedly to put his arm around Lennart while the two are sleeping in the same bed (non-sexually). Besides being so self-centered that he does not notice that Ronnie is in love with him, Lennart is astonishingly rude when Ronnie invites him to go to a beach and then to a restaurant. In both cases, Lennart leaves with other men for impersonal sex; Ronnie can be seen to be visually stunned at the sheer rudeness of his new “friend.” Without doubt, Lennart is a narcissist who has emotional problems related to emotional intimacy likely stemming from his relationship with his emotionally-distant and harsh father (whose funeral attracts only six people).

Lennart’s distancing himself from any sort of emotional intimacy is once again on display in Lennart’s “relationship” with Bas, who moves in with Lennart. Bas confides to Ronnie that Lennart wants it “both ways” in being able to go out separately to have impersonal sex with other men and yet still wanting “a cozy domestic life.” The film’s message is that the two desires are incompatible, especially when “open” relationships include “poly,” which is when the outside sex includes romantic feelings. Frank Houtappels, the film’s screenwriter, arguably should have gone further by including in the dialogue between Bas and Ronnie, something to the effect that Lennart has a psychological problem that is impairing his ability to form and have genuine romantic relationships, and that he is acting like a child in wanting to have it both ways—anonymous sex separately while keeping Bas to himself. At one point, Lennart says to a worried Ronnie, “Why would Bas even look at other men? He just needs to look at me.” The asymmetry is not lost on Bas, which I suspect is why he moves out without leaving his new address as soon as he is diagnosed HIV positive. Such convenient (to Lennart) asymmetry belies trust, which in turn is requisite to an emotionally intimate relationship. Confronted with these points, had they been in the script, Lennart could have been made, as per the script, to have a temper tantrum befitting his abject immaturity and his related refusal to confront himself and make difficult choices. The stunted condition of his character would really have been made transparent.

Once at the beach, Bas quietly scurries away from lying with Lennart on the sand to have anonymous sex with a man, which is likely how Bas (and perhaps then Lennart, though he is being careful sexually) contracts HIV. Lennart has refused Bas’s preference that the two men be monogamous. Such a request is very reasonable, not only so the “couple” could build up enough exclusive intimacy to have a genuine romantic relationship, but also because so many other men around them are dropping like flies from having contacted HIV and then AIDS. Incredibly, Lennart even dismisses Ronnie’s question: “Do you trust Bas to be careful?” Ronnie, more so than Lennart, is looking out for Lennart’s best interest in terms of staying alive. Something is clearly wrong with Lennart, and his sexual promiscuity and avoidance of commitment evince something more serious than just a “lifestyle.”

In 2021, when Ronnie has both Lennart and Bas over for dinner, dramatic tension is palpable because Lennart and Bas have not been in contact since Bas left Lennart without even saying good-bye in 1987. At the dinner, Bas explains that he had been very angry at Lennart, and rightly so, for Lennart had not been fair at all with Bas sexually. Even at the dinner, while Lennart is upstairs talking with Ronnie, Bas leaves unannounced, which means that Bas is not interested in any contact with his former “boyfriend.” It is then that Lennart realizes not only that he has been needlessly lonely throughout his life—he tells Ronnie and Bas that they have been the only people who have really known him—but also that Ronnie has been and still is in love with Lennart. Finally, and therein lies the tragedy of it all, Lennart is able to embrace Ronnie both emotionally and physically and Lennart invites Ronnie to embrace him physically. Had enough gay men confronted Lennart in the 1980’s on his severe problem with emotional intimacy stemming from an emotionally-distant and very critical father, and on how Lennart was using anonymous sex to distance the men closest to him, perhaps he would not have been able to deny his psychological condition by assuming that he was behaving in line with a popular non-monogamous “lifestyle” that is admittedly so popular in the gay “community,” and had even become normative, and thus imposed, in the Castro gay district in San Francisco by 2026.

The film can thus serve an important role in its message that any “lifestyle” which uses promiscuity to foil emotional intimacy can legitimately be criticized rather than taken as valid in an “anything goes” relativism in which the feelings of other people don’t matter. The pathetic Don’t Judge excuse can finally be exculpated and replaced with valid criticism. Just because a lot of gay men use anonymous (and even “poly” so-called loves) sex to obviate emotional intimacy does not mean that validity follows. It may be that so many gay men are clinically compromised and thus weak in refusing to end their slavish addiction to momentary pleasure because “coming out” (i.e., admitting being gay to other people, especially close friends and family, especially to parents) has been emotionally traumatizing. Addressing the resultant scars goes completely under the radar under the subterfuge of the norm of gay promiscuity as “cool.”

Because not even the very real danger of AIDS motivated such men as Lennart in the 1980s to curtail anonymous, unprotected sex especially if there is a devoted man at home, the underlying emotional fragility and fear of the weak who are so prone to betray close romantic relations and even put life itself at risk can be assessed as severe.  Ronnie and even Bas, whose “infidelity” is understandable given Lennart’s passive aggression using sex with other men, can be viewed as healthy standards from which the sheer distance to Lennart’s can be perceived. Implied in the film is the value in making such distance transparent within the gay “community,” such that gay men like Ronnie and Bas can finally gain enough momentum to hold up a mirror by which the Lennarts in the gay world may finally see themselves for what they represent and instantiate. Even so, the sweet honey of momentary pleasure could forestall sufficient motivation to change even if the result of continued denial is a life of loneliness, such as Lennart has suffered until he and Ronnie “find” each other at the dinner in 2021 in the midst of another pandemic. Watching Lennart when he is a young man, it would be difficult to visualize him as a shrunken shell in some hospital bed, or, as is the case, as a bitter, lonely old man whose health has been ravaged by AIDS. That he somhehow defies the death sentence in the late 1980s may seem unjust, given how passive aggressive he is to both Ronnie and Bas as a young adult, until the depth of emotional pain is revealed on Lennart’s face at Ronnie’s house in 2021, when the former beauty of his youth can no longer mask his inner condition.

In discussing the film live to an audience in 2026, Houtappels, the screenwriter, said that at least the “covid” virus did not discriminate, whereas AIDS spread largely (though not completely) between gay men. The film can be interpreted as making the point that sordid values and bad behavioral choices (i.e., bad character) and even mental illness played a role in why the virus spread so, though admittedly the extent to which sexual promiscuity has been valued in the gay “community” even as normative (rather than sordid) can also be blamed. In The Normal Heart (2014), for example, Julia Roberts as Dr. Emma Brookner strongly advises gay activists to wear condoms during anal sex because how the virus is transmitted is not yet known. “You don’t know what you are asking of us!” one of the gay men in the room objects as if she is asking them to live like monks. Crucially, she stares the men down and is unrelenting: You need to wear condoms whether you like it or not. She is stunned that grown men would prioritize moments of momentary pleasure so highly that even wearing condoms to stay alive asking to much. In Downtown, Ronnie asks Lennart if he trusts Bas to be careful sexually. It is a pity that physician Brookner is not in the film to sit Lennart down for a reality-adjustment. I certainly am judging you for being so stupidly careless and even risking Bas’s life.

Lest it be concluded that every young gay man is like Lennart, it is important to note that Ronnie and Bas are also major gay characters in the film. Ronnie is out promoting societal awareness of the pandemic afflicting mostly gay men, and he is even caring for dying men in hospital beds. Religious organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention gloss homosexuality as if every gay men were a Lennart, and thus miss the saintliness of gays like Ronnie even while hypocritically preaching on separating the wheat from the chaff! To castigate what Lennart represents from the pulpit is hardly anti-gay, and lauding the Ronnies and the Bas’s for compassion for the sick and courage for a committed romantic relationship, respectively, would prove that exposing the Lennarts is hardly “homophobic” (which is a convenient misnomer). The film provides a clear template from which preachers can separate the wheat from the chaff because Lennart and Ronnie are so very antithetical, even in their own relationship.